The Great Mulligan

There has been some low hilarity, and one high crime against history and memory, attending the sudden reappearence on the scene of C-Plus Augustus, the previous president of these United States. The occasion is the opening of the George W. Bush Presidential Library, in which it is rumored that every book starts with Chapter 11. (Apparently, one of the exhibits is an interactive quiz that asks the visitor to the museum what the visitor would do if confronted by all the things that got themselves fked up during the Avignon Presidency. My answer to all of them would be, "Don't let Mickey The Dunce steal Florida," but that's just me.) However, the opening of the library roughly coincided with the bloody events surrounding the Boston Marathon, and that has prompted yet another revival of the brutally dishonest notion that the presidency of George W. Bush began on September 12, 2001, that he arose, full-grown, from the rubble of lower Manhattan.

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The best example came from the inexplicably employed Jennifer Rubin, who took to her space in the inexplicably still publishing Washington Post op-ed pre-school to argue the following, as our old friend, Clio, Muse Of History, started guzzling Popov and huffing airplane glue:

Unlike Obama's tenure, there was no successful attack on the homeland after 9/11.

Thus do we confront what we can call The Great Mulligan, which is granted by the dimmer lights in the chandelier to the president and to the national security team — Hi, Condi! — who presided over the most massive intelligence failure in American history, and over the greatest loss of life to an enemy attack on American soil since everybody hugged it out at Appomattox. This has popped up from time to time in the years since it became obvious what a complete and utter failure the Bush presidency really was. Sorry we lied you into a war, but we kept you safe. Sorry we demolished American values, and just about every shred of American moral credibility in the world, but we kept you safe. Sorry we let New Orleans drown, but we kept you safe. Sorry we allowed the national economy to blow up, but we kept you safe. In fact, if you sent C-Plus Augustus into his own museum, and had him take that interactive quiz, and provided he didn't break a thumb trying to get a Diet Coke out of the exhibit, his answer to everything would be I kept you safe.

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No. In fact, you didn't. Stop saying that before 3000 ghosts come to your room some night and pummel you with ectoplasmic bags of sheep dung.

The historical record is quite clear. Upon taking office, the Bush administration de-emphasized the Clinton team's almost-obsessive search for Osama bin Laden. That's why Richard Clarke got shoved aside. That's why John Ashcroft changed the FBI's focus from the pursuit of international terrorists to the pursuit of Tommy Chong. That's why presidential daily press briefings didn't get read while the president was clearing brush the month before the attacks. It's also why his briefer on the topic got himself told, "You covered your ass now." But that was nothing compared to the ass-covering that went on in the aftermath of the attacks — Really, now, Condi. A "historical document"? That's still hilarious. — as the members of the administration tried to prevaricate their way out of their abject failure to keep anyone safe. It was nine months of misfeasance in office, and inexcusable neglect of duty, that ended in the deaths of more than 3000 Americans.

And I am sorry. But you don't get a free one on these. You cannot argue that you kept us safe after your obvious negligence played a role in getting 3000 of us killed. We should laugh at anyone who tries to make this argument, and we should be angered that a presidential library puts together an exhibit of the all the cock-ups that followed the biggest cock-up of them all, and asks, arrogantly, the same question posed to generations of sportswriters by half-bright outfielders after they let one get by them to cost their team a ballgame.

What would you have done, motherfker? You ever play the game?

The very fact that anyone, even Jennifer Rubin, would make this argument publicly illustrates that we have not entirely integrated the facts of the 9/11 attacks into their proper place in our history and our memory. They were acts of savagery, but they were not mindless. They were deliberate and well-planned and they largely succeeded. Our national intelligence systems, and the people who were running them at the time, up to and including the incurious president of the United States, wandering the Texas scrub with his chain-saw, failed utterly to confront even the possibility that such attacks were possible, and thus failed utterly to keep anyone safe. Then, they responded by lying the country into a war of aggression that failed to keep thousands of American soldiers safe, that failed to keep hundreds of thousands of Iraqis safe, failed to keep the rule of law safe, and failed to keep the national economy, and the people who depend on it, which is pretty much all of us, safe. Those are only some of the things that C-Plus Augustus failed to keep safe, and they all pretty much began when he failed to keep 3000 of our fellow citizens safe in New York and Washington, and in a field in Pennsylvania, where died some brave people who actually did keep some people safe. All of the worst parts of that presidency flowed from that simple fact — that we did not really confront what happened on September 11, 2001 but, rather, allowed ourselves and our memory to be seduced by simpleton narratives of collective innocence, which necessarily included the simpleton narrative that our leaders were innocent victims of diabolical agencies the true nature of which — "Nobody could have conceived of using a airliner as a missile." Except, of course, that people had been talking about it for years. Thanks again, Condi. — they could not be expected to understand. Everything that came afterwards, everything that makes the new library a monument to everything libraries are not supposed to be about, proceeds from our granting to these people The Great Mulligan.